


Eleusinian

by lightningwaltz



Category: Monsta X (Band)
Genre: Abuse, Alternate Universe - All In (Music Video), Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Cults, Depression, Drug Use, Families of Choice, Flowers, M/M, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Rituals, Surreal, Unresolved Sexual Tension, What am I doing, why was All In THAT GOOD?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-01
Updated: 2016-06-01
Packaged: 2018-07-11 15:33:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7058326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lightningwaltz/pseuds/lightningwaltz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>‘We vow to fill our empty hearts.'</i>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>A series of fics about the Clan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eleusinian

**Author's Note:**

> Hahaha. So. I really, really loved All In. It's inspired the hell out of me (ie; it fucked me up.) This fic will be where I store all my fics about this music video (and, hopefully, the sequel MVs!) I should add that I don't envision this being a chronological exploration of the Clan. Instead, each chapter will focus on one of the MV's characters, in one specific moment in time. It will probably jump around based on whatever is capturing my interest at a given time. For example, this first chapter is about Hyungwon before and during one of the Clan's mystery rites. There are things I hope to write for all the others, too, because I was so fascinated the snippets we got of worldbuilding and characterization. The others are present here, too, to varying degrees, and I'll put them in the tags whenever I focus on one of them in a later chapter.
> 
>  **Content notes:** This fic (and subsequent chapters most likely) delve into the content in the music video. So there are portrayals of abuse, depression, cult-like behavior, dystopia, etc. There's also the drug use that happens in the video, and some intense kissing while two characters are stoned as hell.

Later tonight, a sacred frenzy will lay claim to their hearts, minds, and the intangible arena of their souls. It’s risky behavior, because no human should come close to approaching gods. And yet the Clan does it every month, when the moon turns her face from the earth. They do this because it’s hazardous to taunt soldiers, it’s hazardous to have weapons, it’s hazardous to have parents. It’s even hazardous to love. 

They do this because the Rites are dangerous, and they risk having their souls drowning in the ether. But they this same threat lifts them out of the banal cruelty of humankind. Calling on the divine isn’t easy, though. There are costs and bargains. And so the preparations for the Rites last from the gilded afternoon until the last few gasps of dusk. 

The Clan arrives in shifts, one-by-one, in the same exact order each time. That’s how Hyungwon knows exactly what will happen. He climbs the same mossy hills, slides in between the same ancient boulders, enters the same tunnel. Everything smells like vines and blossoms, stone and water. Vanquished traces of smoke. 

He whispers a birdlike tune- a code, _their_ code- and someone whistles the rest of the tune back at him. 

Jooheon appears into view like the shadows birthed him into being. He knows how to make an entrance, command a crowd (even a crowd of one other person.) The blessed flowers are in one hand, and he holds them as easily as his battered backpacks of illicit firearms. His other hand holds a flashlight. It illuminates his body in a dreamy arc, and everything feels as grainy and distant as security footage. He refuses to turn on the LED lights until everything has been properly consecrated. 

“Yeah, man,” Jooheon says, and it should ruin his affect. Instead, when he smiles, Hyungwon can already picture the petals caught between his sharp teeth. “Let’s do this.” 

‘This’ involves turning on several more lamps (they will be set outside when the Rites properly begin) and Jooheon placing the flowers in Hyungwon’s fist. It make him appear like a carved idol; the bodily representative of what they are trying to reach. This in turn reminds him of Minhyuk. Minhyuk, who _does_ look at Hyungwon like he’s worth worshipping.

The thought makes Hyungwon reach for his knife. 

He flays the flowers, cuts them from their spine-like stem, minces them into purple particles. Hyungwon’s own father is a pharmacist, but he’s indifferent to his customers and even worse to his son. Instead, the man’s hands are at their gentlest when he tends to his potted plants. Placing seeds into earth, examining the blossoms, clucking to himself when things are browning or dehydrated. His hands often smell like herbs when he punches Hyungwon.

People pay generously for his peppers (they’re a bit of excitement in a landscape of ash), but they’re like gun powder in Hyungwon’s mouth. 

Now, as he slices up the blessed flowers, their perfume tastes like companionship and sacrifice. It’s not a calming realization.

When it’s halfway done, he speculates on whether flowers experience pain. He’d wondered things when he still went to school and they’d studied the composition of the cell from yellowed textbooks. Could something like that have rudimentary thoughts? Was it aware of its own existence and did it want better things?

Jooheon is doing his own preparations, flitting in and out of the half-light like a bat. In his casual clothes (especially in that hat) he looks half like a combatant, half like a random ruffian, and entirely like a threat. 

_Say something. Say that you hope they all survive._

Thoughts are like airy clouds, while the proper words are like stones caught in his throat. 

“Do flowers feel pain?” he asks this instead.

If they were in a group, Jooheon might mock him. Instead, the question is one of the very rare things that makes him pause the preparation for the Rites. “We’re helping them unleash their true purpose.”

A convenient answer, but maybe the correct one. A bullet needed a gun, and a sacred flower needed a devotee. 

Hyunwoo arrives next with two great pails of water. He’s strong, but even he strains under their weight. When no one is looking, Hyungwon stares into them until his reflection looks like another self that he can touch, caress, or slap at will. 

Minhyuk comes by after that. He’s here to set things ablaze. 

Heat is the crucial part of this. Heat and conflagration and light. Swallowing the flowers has an effect, but boiling is what produces transcendent results. Maybe it’s the combination of water and fire. Maybe it’s because flowers come from the earth, and maybe it’s because there is air in their mouths. 

Either way, Minhyuk is necessary because he knows how to set controlled fires, and he knows how to burn everything down. You only have to know to ask him for one or the other.

Tonight Minhyuk strikes a match. The tiny flame oscillates one way and Hyungwon thinks he’s never known anyone better than Minhyuk. The tiny flame oscillates another way and Hyungwon thinks can never know Minhyuk well enough. 

Then Minhyuk sets fire to the kindling. 

“Hey,” Minhyuk said, his voice surprisingly thin, and probably not because the area smells of wood smoke. They’re not quite alone, but they haven’t been this close together in a while. “Hyungwon, your fingers are purple.”

They always are during this point in the preparation, and there’s no actual need to comment on this. It says something that Minhyuk did. Hyungwon reaches his stained fingers to Minhyuk’s face and draws a purple line across his cheek bone. Just below his rapidly blinking eye. 

“Here. How about you get a head start on all the face paint.”

For a moment they forget to breath, and it’s not because of the smoke. They’ve punctured ventilation into the sides of this tunnel-cave a long time ago. The beaker-turned-chalice rumbles in a way that indicates it’s near to boiling.

Then Minhyuk swipes his hand over his face until it’s entirely clean again. He’s sweating, so he can erase such things easily. “Jooheon might freak if he knows we started the Rites early. Can’t let him see.” He’s joking again, but there’s nothing funny about how he licks his hand free of the residue. There’s nothing reassuring about how his stare collides with Hyungwon’s.

This is another kind of captivity.

The others make their arrival. Laughter and conversations branch off and collide, and it’s chaotic over the steady beat of ritual. At one point Minhyuk asks about Hyunwoo’s ailing grandfather, and they all become silent under the weight of that imminent tragedy. 

Hyungwon had forgotten all about that, because he’s too busy trying to avoid thinking about tomorrow. He stares down at this folded hands. There’s purple under his nails, purple clinging to cuticles. Darker than wine, and lighter than his mood. Minhyuk’s decency is as boundless as the sky they cannot reach. Meanwhile, Hyungwon’s moored on a private island of misery. He’s made an idolatry of self-hatred, and he doesn’t know why any of the others try to reach him.

“Alright, get out. All of you.” 

Jooheon dismisses them all so dispassionately, even though he’s about to sanctify this rusting tunnel. Even though none of them know what, exactly, he does in there on his own. Even though none of them dare discuss it. 

Not like it matters. They have things to do. They all must scatter before converging again.

Hyungwon sets his lamp in spot on the ground, and his bag of clothes in another place. Insects shimmer in an out of the sphere of light, like flakes of snow or falling petals. Like raindrops of shrapnel. It’s an eerie look for an eerie time and place, here in this strange borderland between daily life and the Rites. 

And Hyungwon finds that he doesn’t want to enter it alone tonight, somehow. 

“Minhyuk?” he whispers. It shouldn’t work, it shouldn’t reach his target’s ears. 

But there he is, emerging between the skeletal trees. His hair is even paler in the night. They don’t say much as they pull off their worn, casual clothing. The almost-autumnal air is cold against Hyungwon’s skin, and he doesn’t want to think about the mosquitos that he can hear whining near his ears. He doesn’t mind being almost naked like this, even though Minhyuk is obviously staring. He was more exposed when Minhyuk pulled the mask from his face and saw his swollen eyes. Minhyuk had rushed away then. Fifteen minutes later he’d come back and tended to him with rudimentary first aid skills. Minhyuk had ground his teeth the whole time, but his hands had been so gentle. 

Hyungwon had healed quickly thanks to that, but his restored skin feels heavy and cloying. Like it’s more of a mask than anything else, and his bruised and bleeding self had been the real deal. 

Either way, he’s soon covering himself with his uniform for the Rites. Jooheon doesn’t permit them to approach the altar unless they’re properly attired. This means the kind of suits they only pull out for baptisms, weddings, or funerals. Clothes meant for the beginning or end of a life.

Hyungwon isn’t great with words, but he can easily take care of Minhyuk’s buttons. His thumbs and fingers work, pushing them in and up, through carefully stitched holes in the fabric. In the end, Minhyuk is panting a little, like Hyungwon had been _unbuttoning_ him. 

“Thanks,” Hyungwon says, when he’s done. _Thanks for existing. I don’t know what to do with you, but thank you._

“Shouldn’t I be saying that?” Minhyuk says, pointing vaguely at his collar. 

“You can if you want.” 

As usual, Jooheon had done his due diligence back in the tunnel-cave. Everything is ablaze in the spaces between boulders and ivy. Like someone had cracked an egg and light poured out from the shattered shell. They’re only allowed to approach by following the distant glow of the altar. 

There hadn’t been so many rules that first time. No rules at all, in fact They’d all just run into the wilds (an area no one patrolled because it was presumed to be dangerous; the assumption was correct, though not for the reasons anyone expected.) They’d found this grove and cave. They’d found this wild cache of the sacred flowers, and they’d feasted on them. Feasted for the first time ever. 

Hyungwon recalls that they’d all fallen down, stared up into the sky, and seen _something._ Now it’s ethereally distant in his memories. An astounding shard of a dream. But whatever he’d seen that night had made him understand… _everything._ Hyungwon had suddenly become the vital center of all creation. The fulcrum of the past, present, and future, and everything that might have been, and would never be. 

He doesn’t have to ask to know that no one in the Clan has ever come close to that moment again. Not in all their recreations of that night. Not with all their carefully chosen rules and rituals. He also knows it’s worth chasing forever until they find it again.

“I wonder what those tunnels were used for,” Minhyuk says now, extinguishing his flashlight.

Hyungwon turns off his own lamp. It’s a moonless night, but he doesn’t have to look when he reaches for Minhyuk’s hand. 

“I’m sure the authorities would be cool with it if we asked around.” They snicker precisely because it’s distinctly unfunny and distinctly untrue. Even when they stop, Hyungwon can still feel the rhythm of laughter in Minhyuk’s palm. Clasped so hard against his hand.

Jooheon is more magician than priest. LED lights swing from on high, and the tattered tarps look like tapestries. Cast in this glow, the dead pipes that encircle them are transformed into orbiting celestial bodies. Everything is blue and purple, everything seems like a direct challenge to the void of the deep night (a challenge to the emptiness in Hyungwon, too.) Smoke slithers around them glowing from the fire, as ethereal as an illustration of the milky way. 

Here’s the truth; Hyungwon never expects the Rites to _work_. He’s a doubter at heart, who claws his way back to faith each and every time. So he always accepts a bowl of lavender-hued flower water, and wonders why he expects ecstasy from something like this. But Jooheon starts their hymn, and Hyungwon joins in with their chorus. He’s helped create this ceremony, and he belongs more during this moment than when they joke together. They all drink at once, and it’s a sacrament that’s as warm as blood. 

Just one sip is probably enough. He experiences the frantic excitement that comes from running and running for no other reason but joy. The way the heart races when lightning strikes your house. But everything is easy and comfortable, too; like lying by a relaxing stream, like having enough in your stomach, like sinking into a bath. A minute takes on the length of an hour. A week. It seems strange that Hyungwon can’t always be this way, when it’s the most agreeable thing in the world. Why would he want to feel anything else?

All at once he understands peace itself. What peace would look like in the world. What peace would look like within himself. He tells himself to stash this revelation somewhere deep in his heart, so that each pulse carries it throughout his body and keeps him alive. He knows he’s ordered himself to do this every time. He knows he’s always woken up sober and bereft.

Hyungwon _knows_ this, but it’s another man’s misfortune. 

There’s an excess of ceremony during the preparations, and that’s because disorder is the central tenet of the Rites. Jooheon chants and chants about mercy and death, war and plenty. It’s different and the same every time. He’s indecipherable and he makes sense. Jooheon’s not wearing his cap and Hyungwon stares at the place on his forehead where he pointed a soldier’s gun. First a bruise seems to appear in that spot, then he watches as it spreads over his face. It’s a mask. It cracks and bleeds and looks just like Hyungwon’s true face.

Then the fire flickers in another direction, and the mask blows away. 

Hyungwon seems to see between everyone’s disguises tonight. Everything they will become. Kihyun’s feet flake into ash. Hyunwoo is tossing petals into the hearth and they transform into the money he needs. Hoseok, Changkyun, and Minhyuk all catch fire, but it’s frost-like fire from the distant stars. Touching them would freeze you to death.

One sip might be enough, but they hardly stop there. They more Hyungwon drinks, the less that life seems like a burden. He melts into the pipes at his back. He stares into the boiling, purple water, and wonders what it would be like to immerse himself in it. Baptize himself in it. Doing such a thing would probably melt him to his very essence, boiling away his impurities and restlessness.

He allows Minhyuk to paint his cheeks, and is awestruck at the interconnecting coincidences that brought him to this exact point. This exact physical location, this exact set of friends, this exact miraculous dream. 

Minhyuk’s fingers are cool from the pigment, but somehow it’s like being coated with gasoline. Hyungwon’s halfway through the experience when he realizes the tide has pulled them through several firsts. Their first kiss, yes. But there are other nebulous firsts, too. The first time Minhuk’s stroked Hyungwon’s hip bone. The first time Hyungwon licked sweat from Minhyuk’s collarbones and heard him moan. 

This should taste overwhelmingly of flowers. It does, though not as expected. Hyungwon feels like he’s swallowing burning petals, just before they turn into embers. Sparklers and fireworks made of flowers. Flares made of petals. His eyes are open, and he watches Minhyuk’s earrings sway and cast shadows. 

The others are carrying on; they drink and yell. They bless each other and pray. They adorn each other with paint and affection. At one point Hoseok throws petals their way, but otherwise they merit little comment. They aren’t the first to kiss during the Rites, and they won’t be the last. 

So he sits in Minhyuk’s lap, drives his tongue deeper into that mouth, imbibes even more of their mutual sacrament. He rocks himself against Minhyuk, and each moment gets a little closer to understanding salvation 

Could peace really be this simple? He’d never had a talent for happiness. Others, near and far, had set the trajectory of his life. Could he really reach for what he needed?

At one point they have to stop and look at each other. He waits for more truths to reveal themselves in this holy light. He can only see himself in Minhyuk’s eyes, though. A purer reflection, clearer than he seems in water or mirrors. Hyungwon sees himself shaped through someone else’s love, and he wonders if that’s an illusion, too.

Then again, the Rites have shown that some illusions are also the truth.

“‘We vow to fill our empty hearts,’” Minhyuk says, quoting one of the Clan’s most sacred oaths. They’re only invoked on the edge of something truly important. 

Then Minhyuk snaps a flower from its stem and places it in Hyungwon’s mouth.

**Author's Note:**

> So at the end of All In the encounter that... purple glowing blob thing. For some reason, I've become found of that whole thing being a 'reunion' of sorts. In other words, I like the end that they encountered that thing really early on (before they became the Clan!), experienced some kind of enlightenment, and kept chasing that feeling forever after. So I decided to include that headcanon in this fic. 
> 
> Also, in here, I've decided that Minhyuk's act of arson is after the straw that broke that camel's back. He's seen the results of Hyungwon's abuse multiple times, but at that point he couldn't take it anymore. During this fic he's still in the process of experiencing that slow-building need for vengeance.


End file.
